Mark Wignall: Trump is Plainly Putin’s Potted Plant

World News, USA:Bizarre as a word used to describe President Donald Trump’s moronic snorting of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s talking points in Helsinki a few days ago does not do justice to the reality of it as leaders of the western alliance stood in shock and awe as Trump tore down the FBI, the NSA, the CIA and essentially America and, in front of a global audience, elevated Putin to the role of World Boss.

Comedian Trevor Noah of the Daily Show probably captured it best when he said, ‘This is what you get when you put a KGB agent up against a KFC agent.’ With widespread suspicions that Putin has something on Trump and because of that, Donald Trump was forced to suck up to Putin in his presence at the double podium in Helsinki, I say to America, what took you so long to figure that out.

A cowardly Trump — on arrival back in Washington and facing immense pressure from a few notables in his party and scorching criticisms from usually friendly Fox News talking heads like Neil Cavuto and Brett Baier —-attempted to partially walk back his statements. In doing so he merely added tragedy to disaster and proved to the world that in Putin’s presence, Trump is a trembling, dancing puppet and Putin is his master choreographer.

The American President still believes that he need not reach out to any other community except the brain-dead ‘deplorables’ who voted for him in 2016 and the sycophantic GOP enablers in the US Congress. That said, I am certain that even though many of them would be prepared to vote for him again, the spectacle of an American president being demeaned by its biggest geopolitical foe must be troubling to significant percentages of those 2016 voters.

One need not possess advanced degrees in logic and political science to understand what is likely at play. Spy agencies for all the big powers including the U.S. and Russia usually cultivate their potential assets years out from the date their key services are needed.

I would not be surprised after the Mueller probe is completed if one of its main findings is that Trump was being cultivated by Putin and his GRU from as early as 2009. I would not be surprised if Mueller finds that Putin has something especially compromising on Trump like a private salacious romp with loose women or, the self-styled billionaire is up to his neck in ties with dirty Russian money.

Think of it, if Putin could clone himself if not his looks and place that clone in the White House, the clone could not do a better job than what Trump is doing now; making America look weak, the president tearing down America’s intelligence agencies and elevating Russia to ally while labeling those in the EU as foes and berating NATO members as leeches.

I am not letting America off the hook by not acknowledging that that great nation in its not-so recent history has had a litany of ‘dirty tricks’ in its foreign policy especially using the CIA to surreptitiously destabilize foreign governments and even assassinate leaders deemed hostile to America’s interest at the time. At the very least, the American press and even the US government itself has had the capacity to unearth those misdeeds as time passes. But this time around the people of the US and the Republican enablers in Congress are seeing a spectacle that they have never seen before.

A US President who is very likely Putin’s footstool and is also plainly a Russian agent.